A Crack in Big Tech’s Armor

On Wednesday night, I was picking up my daughter from volleyball practice when something about the line of middle-school girls waiting in the hallway caught my attention. It wasn’t just that they all had smartphones—that was to be expected outside of our little homeschooler bubble. And it wasn’t that half of them, at any given time, were looking at their screens rather than talking to one another—if anything, that’s a pretty healthy ratio these days. It was what they were doing when they weren’t looking at their phones. Rather than hanging limply at their sides, their phone-holding hands were oddly fidgety, restlessly gripping and stroking the polished glass.

Slightly disturbed, I looked it up and discovered this is a documented phenomenon—a 2020 article in the Journal of Consumer Research, “The Smartphone as Pacifying Technology,” described users “self-soothing” with phones like a child with a teddy bear. Unlike the teddy bear, however, the phone was both comforter and tormentor for these teens.A sinister Stockholm syndrome was on display in that hallway, as these girls sought rest in the source of their restlessness.

Ironically, I was headed home after volleyball practice to celebrate with my wife after one of the greatest victories for child online safety in my lifetime: that day, 51 state attorneys general had announced a landmark settlement with Meta for $17 billion for its decade and a half of systemic child abuse in what many commentators were calling Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment.”